Can Edward Snowden Stay in Hong Kong?

In choosing to go to Hong Kong, Edward Snowden, the former C.I.A. tech, who leaked news of the U.S. government’s collection of private Internet and telephone data, put himself at the intersection of forces more powerful than what he called that city’s “commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent.” He’s not wrong about that commitment—it’s one of Hong Kong’s most appealing distinctions—but going to Hong Kong out of devotion to free speech is a bit like going to Tibet out of a devotion to Buddhism; the people love it, though they live under authorities who intervene when they choose. On Monday Wen Yunchao, a liberal blogger in Hong Kong, wrote that Snowden has gone “out of the tiger’s den, and into the wolf’s lair.”

Snowden said that he flew to Hong Kong on May 20th from his home in Hawaii, and that he has been holed up in a hotel ever since, ordering room service, reading about Dick Cheney, and, in effect, waiting for large countries to decide what to do with him. (Amy Davidson has written about his decision to come forward.) In an interview with the Guardian, Snowden indicated that he sensed that his fate was more in the hands of China than Hong Kong: “I think it is really tragic that an American has to move to a place that has a reputation for less freedom,” he said. “Still, Hong Kong has a reputation for freedom in spite of the People’s Republic of China.”

Assuming that he has not already departed—he may have—will the decision about his future be up to authorities in Hong Kong or Beijing? Both. The local government’s extradition treaty with the U.S. allows either side to refuse in matters of political offense, but Hong Kong coöperates closely with American law enforcement, and local lawyers could not recall a case when extradition was blocked for political reasons. The Beijing government has veto power when “defense, foreign affairs or essential public interest or policy” is on the line, and while it might prefer to avoid openly meddling in a case that would inflame Hong Kong’s local sensibilities, it can make its preferences felt, and it has little incentive to protect Snowden from his own government.

Hong Kong, of course, is one of China’s two “special administrative regions,” (the other is Macau)—former colonies that returned to Chinese control in the nineteen-nineties with the assurance that Beijing would handle foreign and intelligence affairs but would not seek full political control for a period of fifty years. Fundamentally, Hong Kong remains an oasis of freedom compared to the mainland, although there is an ongoing debate about how much interference has moved in around the edges. Last week, Hong Kong held its annual demonstration to commemorate the crackdown at Tiananmen Square, in 1989—the anniversary was suppressed on the mainland—but the Hong Kong Journalists Association found in its most recent survey, last year, that eighty-seven per cent of its members “thought that Hong Kong now enjoys less freedom than” in 2005. Dissidents who would offend Beijing have been denied visas to enter Hong Kong, and the latest U.S. State Department report on Human Rights in Hong Kong (irony noted), says, among various positive and critical observations, that “there was a widespread public perception that police abuse of power increased dramatically during the year.”

It is doubtful that Beijing sees a net advantage in holding on to Snowden as a bargaining chip. Neither side likes exogenous ingredients in complex diplomacy. When the persecuted blind laywer Chen Guangcheng sought refuge at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, in 2012, it caused nearly as much agitation among American officials as did it among their Chinese counterparts. Xi Jinping has just returned to Beijing from a summit with President Obama, in which both sides sought to downplay differences and emphasize an attempt to accommodate each other’s interests, up to a point. Beijing spends much of its time trying to persuade other governments to send back former or current government officials who have fled abroad. Without my making any judgment on the virtues of Snowden’s actions, the U.S. government perceives him in much the same light that the Chinese government perceives its cadres who flee abroad in order to publicize wrongdoing or to escape debts or prosecution for corruption. The Chinese state media frequently describes diplomatic efforts to “pave the way for the return of hundreds of government officials wanted for graft” and it has crowed about gaining greater coöperation from the United States.

Snowden, from the sound of it, knows many of the risks of his new location. He speculated that he could be rendered by the C.I.A., or “they could pay off the Triads. Any of their agents or assets.” The Triads are a non-starter; even if they weren’t too busy making money in Macau, this case is now front-page news, and Snowden’s fate seems more likely to play out in the klieg lights of the press than the shadows of a C.I.A. rendition.

Finally, there is the matter of the sheer cosmic strangeness of the state of affairs in which an American whistle-blower feels that he should flee to Chinese territory to avoid the power of the U.S. government. Snowden said, “If I wanted to see your e-mails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your e-mails, passwords, phone records, credit cards…. I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things.” Mainland China, which now controls Snowden’s fate to some degree, is that kind of society, with an added twist: in the U.S. there may be an increasingly powerful, overweening state, but in China’s clamorous ecology of money and force, the state is just one invasive entity among many. Over lunch in Beijing not long ago, a friend of mine who works for a private corporate investigator told me offhand that, with one phone call, he could get me a transcript of every text message I had ever sent over the past eight years.

Above: A security guard stands outside the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong. Photograph by Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty.